January 25, 2021
Handler’s affecting and darkly funny debut explores the impact of euthanasia on a family. Edie Richter and her husband, Oren, move from Boston to Edie’s hometown of San Francisco so Edie can be near her father, who has Alzheimer’s. After he stops eating, Edie, without telling her mother or sister, suffocates him. After the funeral, Edie and Oren relocate to Perth, Australia, where Oren’s employer has transferred him. With only occasional freelance work to keep her busy, Edie meanders through her new environment, learning to drive on the left side, hilariously failing to befriend her neighbor, listening to possums fight on her rooftop, and admiring Aboriginal cave art. But she cannot shake the final night she spent with her father, slowly spiraling with her secret as Handler injects breathlessness into each desperate sentence. Edie’s increasingly unpredictable behavior reaches its crescendo with a heartbreaking climax, and along the way, the author explores not merely Edie’s guilt, but the complicated feelings over her loss. This quick, engrossing novel brings laughter and tears. Agent: Steven Salpeter, Curtis Brown.
Starred review from February 1, 2021
A tragicomic exploration of the collateral damage of Alzheimer's disease. "Everyone makes mistakes," says Edie Richter to her wilderness guide, hired for a short trip into the Australian Outback. "I guess it's just learning which ones you can live with," he replies. This conversation, which comes about two-thirds of the way into Handler's striking debut, encapsulates one aspect of the far-reaching existential crisis this loving daughter suffers in the wake of her father's early-onset Alzheimer's diagnosis. When it began, Edie was newly married and living in Boston; she and her husband, Oren, moved back to her hometown of San Francisco to assist with his care. Her mother and younger sister have sold the family auto-parts business, but they're still getting help from her father's longtime employee, Igor, "a gay Croatian who loved Neil Diamond and wore head to toe denim." Amusing details like this, rendered in sharply wrought sentences and brief paragraphs, keep this story of lost moorings light on its feet. "I didn't plan on ending my father's life," Edie explains, "if you can call it a life when a person has essentially become a thing." She also didn't plan on moving to Western Australia, but when her husband's oil-company employer offers a one-year transfer shortly after her father's death, she tells him to accept, thinking maybe she can find her bearings in the middle of nowhere. Ah, poor Edie. Handler gets it right from the title on out. Edie is definitely not alone. Her plight is one many readers will respond to deeply and perhaps even be soothed by. Along those lines, the depiction of Edie's relationship with her somewhat clueless husband, who wants so much to help, hits the perfect note. Profound yet often quite funny, keenly observed, and deeply affecting.
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Starred review from February 15, 2021
Edie Richter writes effective fundraising appeals for nonprofits, but in person she's prickly and blunt, with no gift for small talk. Still grieving after the death of her father, Edie and her husband relocate from San Francisco to Perth, Australia. Surrounded by friendly locals, who always seem to think she's Canadian, Edie attempts to make a fresh start. But even halfway around the world, she can't escape the memory of a terrible act she's committed, and her guilt only compounds her trademark social awkwardness. The longer she's there, the more alienated she feels from everyone around her, even her increasingly frustrated husband. It takes an improbable heart-to-heart with the ubiquitous local #1 Real Estate agent for Edie to begin to let down her guard, followed by a simultaneously absurd and heartbreaking encounter involving a projectile dead possum, for her to realize that she has never actually been alone. Debuting novelist Handler's Edie joins the ranks of unforgettably eccentric, intelligent women protagonists, such as the titular character in Gail Honeyman's Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine (2017) and Eleanor Flood in Maria Semple's Today Will Be Different (2016).
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